Search Results: climate crisis

Irrigated agriculture systems, like electric grids and city roads, trigger a government's duty of care to the human communities that they sustain. Particularly when they were built with the blood, sweat and tears that went into building our Murray-Darling Basin irrigation communities.

Many of us will wish the new government well, but refrain from putting our own money on its survival. Hopefully our two major parties, which were so happy to do whatever it took to win, no matter what the cost to human lives and ethical values, will recover a deeper sense of what matters.

There was a massive loss of confidence in Labor's policies. The Australian electorate saw through the triviality of what both major parties were offering. Gillard would deserve her party's full support in leading a Labor Government in a hung parliament. This may be the making of her as a great prime minister.

The election has been plagued by trivial spats and personality conflicts, to the neglect of policies based on the values of equity and social justice for everyone. This reinforces the importance of church and community groups
being more active in their social advocacy.

We have just experienced a Shakespearean moment. There is real excitement in the land, a sense of new beginnings, as the Elizabethan figure of Julia Gillard takes the reins as Prime Minister. Rudd, to his credit, has accepted the inevitable with grace and dignity.

The new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres is well qualified
to help heal the wounds of Copenhagen. If the West can learn the lessons of those failed talks and move forward with modesty, flexibility and sensitivity, we may hope for progress.

The Black Saturday Royal Commission seems to be ignoring scientific evidence that climate
change was a major causal factor. The possibility that Victoria's cool mountain ridges
and valleys are drying out and that such ferocious fires are the way of the future might be a truth
too much to bear.

The Howard years made me feel ashamed to be Australian, and I felt about his electoral defeat the way East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall coming down: as a kind of cleansing. Rudd disappoints for a different reason.

Rudd is technically correct that the opposition parties stymied his CPRS bills, but the buck stops with his disappointing climate policy leadership. Upon the failure of Australian parliamentary politics, we need now to find the courage to support mass non-violent
public action modelled on Vietnam War protest.

It is becoming clear that we are probably not going to avert cataclysmic forms of climate change. The foundational Greek and Hebraic imaginaries, the mythical
narratives that frame western civilisation, can no longer contain,
inform and explain what
we experience. We need new stories.

In Australia's next federal election, I'll vote One, Zero, Zero — Greens 1, Labor 0, Coalition 0. This is the only way I can fulfil my voter duty, while recording protest at the failure of our major parties to offer real policies on the planet's climate crisis.